Sixteen-year-old Chelsey Chambers looked with disdain at the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer her father had given her.

He told her that as a new Maine driver, she must keep it in the car at all times. Most kids her age were navigating with cellphones or GPS, but she was told to trust a 96-page map book slightly larger than a Sunday newspaper.

“I thought it was the most useless thing,” said Chambers, now 32. “Dads know things before you do.”

Chambers, who lives in Canton, now finds her Gazetteer indispensible. It allows her to find primitive North Woods campsites, logging roads and little-used fishing holes. It not only shows a lot more than your standard Google Maps route would, it goes places cell signals can’t. In Maine that’s about half the state, or roughly maps 35-70.

The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer was first published in the spring of 1976 by David DeLorme. Fifty years later, it’s still in print, sold at gas stations and convenience stores and crammed between the seats of countless Maine trucks and cars.

It’s inspired at least one song and one Maine-made beer. People hold on to their dog-eared, tattered and coffee-stained Gazetteers for years not just because they are dependable, but because they spark imagination and adventure.

Readers see a dirt road listed as “occasionally passable” and wonder what secrets it holds. They see the marker for the Bingham Esker on the Kennebec River and realize they’ve never seen an esker and don’t even know what it is. (See the description under Unique Natural Features, page 13.) They look at the giant swath of Maine north of Millinocket and west of Route 1, without a single state highway, and try to picture what’s there.

“I keep it on my bedside table and in late January I start thinking about summer adventures. It’s like thumbing through a catalog of stuff to do,” said Troy Bennett, 54, a photographer, musician and freelance writer who lives in Portland. “Plus Google Maps is always trying to change my route and make me go faster, and I’m like ‘goddamnit, I don’t want to go faster.'”

40 YEARS OF FISHING HOLES

Harleyanne Hustus knew her father’s Maine Atlas and Gazetteer was a prized possession. He kept it together for decades with silver duct tape, and marked favorite fishing holes, camp sites and hunting spots with a pencil. More important spots and routes were in pen.

When her father, Loren Hustus, turned 60, the family bought him a brand new Gazetteer. He loved it, but it wasn’t quite the same. When he died about a decade later and family members were going through his things, they found the tattered, duct-taped Gazetteer. He never threw it away.

And neither will Hustus.

“I opened it up and realized there were 40 years of fishing holes, hunting spots, camping spots all carefully marked out. Something so special that we have and will have for years and years,” said Hustus, 33, who teaches preschool at Catherine Morrill Day Nursery in Portland. “That is something that a digital GPS could never hold.”

The old Gazetteer has already proven useful. Loren Hustus had wanted some of his ashes scattered on a favorite section of Collyer Brook in Gray, but Hustus didn’t know exactly how to access it. Then she turned to map 5 and saw her father had marked the spot.

A CATALOG OF MAINE ADVENTURES

David DeLorme says he created the Gazetteer partly because he got lost once, but he’d also worked as a draftsman and as an editor of the student newspaper at the University of Southern Maine. His map-making combined those experiences.

A 96-page paperback map book, it includes 80 maps covering every corner of the state, and 16 pages with details and locations of recreation areas, family outings, campgrounds, unique natural features, hiking trails, ski areas, paddling routes and fishing spots.

The maps themselves include unimproved roads, power lines, tribal land boundaries, dams, locked gates on private roads, manned gates, washed-out roads that are occasionally passable, county seats and a couple dozen other things. There’s a listing of towns and villages, with populations. There’s a section of vital state facts like population, capital, size in square miles, motto, and date admitted to the Union.

Delorme used information from digital databases, paper maps, aerial photography and satellite photography to create his Gazetteer, he said in an email. His Yarmouth-based company went on to create atlases and gazetteers for all 50 states and maps of every part of the world to GPS accuracy, as well as developing GPS mapping technologies.

Garmin is known for making GPS-enabled devices for navigation and communication, including smart watches, and it bought DeLorme in 2016 largely to obtain a communications device called inReach.

Many people, including Bennett, worried at the time that Garmin might stop printing the Gazetteer. Bennett wrote a song called “Keep Your Hands Off My Gazetter,” in protest. In the song, he sings about being OK with someone taking his Moxie or his L.L.Bean boots, but that the Gazetteer would have to be pried from his “cold, dead hand.”

Garmin quickly recognized “the evergreen nature” of the Gazetteer business and decided to continue publishing it, said Sarah Kramlich, senior director of Garmin Services for Garmin International, in an email.

Sales have stayed consistent for the past 10 years or so and the Gazetteer is updated every couple of years, which includes a review of corrections submitted by customers. She said the Gazetteer “has been a mainstay of Maine life and culture since its first printing.”

Even so, Bennett continues to sing “Keep Your Hands Off My Gazetteer” at gigs all over the state as a member of the Half Moon Jug Band. You can probably guess how he finds his way to the shows.

MAINE SPIRIT SPILLS OVER

Growing up in the tiny Washington County town of Trescott, near Lubec, one of Abe Furth’s favorite activities was searching out logging roads and back roads on his bike to see how far he could go.

He’ d take out the family’s Gazetteer and jot down notes about what roads led where, then stuff the notes in his pocket and take off. After high school, he biked across the country and used maps, including his Gazetteer.

Now 44, Furth’s love of the Gazetteer and the adventurous Maine spirit it represents has spilled over into his work — literally. He’s one of the founders of Orono Brewing Company and in March the company launched a beer called Maine Life. The can is designed to look exactly like the Gazetteer’s cover, including the light blue background and green map of the state.

“A lot of my marketing is based on fun or exciting Maine things, so I was using the hashtag #MaineLife a lot. What’s more Maine than a Gazetteer?” said Furth.

Furth envisions making social media videos where he puts the Gazetteer’s back cover, which has a map of the whole state, onto a dart board and then throws a dart at it. Wherever the dart lands, that’s the next place to be explored, with a cooler full of Maine Life Pale Ale.

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While Furth hopes people will bring his company’s Gazetteer-inspired beer to their parties, often in rural Maine you need a Gazetteer just to find the party.

This was the case last year when Judy Harrison, 73, of Bangor was driving with her son to a wedding reception in Willimantic (maps 31, 32, 41), southeast of Moosehead Lake. She says her son, 40, began “freaking out a bit” because they lost cell service and with it, the route to the reception. Harrison, a freelance writer, reached into the back seat for her Gazetteer.

Harrison said other guests at the party, all younger than her, were talking about how they lost cell service and weren’t sure they were still going in the right direction.

 “I had my Gazetteer so I knew where I was going,'” Harrison told the others.

Chambers has also found herself in a group of Gazetteer-less people who weren’t sure which way to go. On a group camping trip in the Allagash a few years ago, Chambers and her husband used their Gazetteer to find an alternate campsite when the one they arrived at was full. The first campsite had been picked by others in the group, using digital means, and now they were too far into the woods to get a cell signal.

“They didn’t have any other campsites downloaded, so we pulled out the Gazetteer and were like ‘Here’s where we are, and here are some other options,” said Chambers, who works in marketing.

David DeLorme is now in his 70s and living on a coastal Maine farm. He’s currently designing robots that can plant, till, water, weed and harvest a garden.

He says that when people learn he created the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, they usually have an interesting story to share. One of his personal favorites involves a man who went fishing and left his car unlocked, and his Gazetteer unprotected.

“When he came back, he found that someone had rifled through his car,” DeLorme said. “And instead of stealing a brand-new rifle, they took his copy of the Maine Atlas.”